Tall And True Short Reads

I'm taking a short break from podcasting because I'm going on a long road trip with my son from Sydney to Western Australia to spend Xmas and New Year with our WA family. But as I did in 2022, I've p…

Cassie lay perfectly still in bed, staring at the shadowy shape on the ceiling overhead. A bulky body and eight legs, a spider, but this wasn't Incy Wincy. It was a huntsman with long hairy legs, nee…

I discovered microfiction when I reviewed Loopholes by Susan McCreery in 2017. By definition, brevity is the key to good microfiction. The stories in Loopholes range from several paragraphs over one …

"Roses are red, violets are blue, I spend my day, thinking of you." Davey reviewed the poem in his exercise book. "Thinking" is what you did at school. It wasn't romantic enough to attempt Mission Im…

It's only early spring, but I'm starting to sweat in Mum and Dad's back garden. I wore my dark English suit for Dad's funeral, and if etiquette permits at wakes, I'd like to slip off the coat. Lookin…

It's a chilly winter morning, and the central heating has barely warmed my flat. I'm rugged up in a jumper and Ugg boots, and the kettle's boiling. There's a knock at the door, and I know who's there…

It's a hot summer afternoon, with no sign of the Freo Doctor. Despite the heat, I'm climbing the tree in Gran's backyard with my brothers and boy cousins while our girl cousins chat in a circle in th…

Season Four will start with a multi-part, longer short story I wrote in June 2023, Some Things Change, consisting of three vignettes set in different locations and times but with a common thread: a p…

I fell in love with live theatre when I saw my first London West End play as a newly-arrived backpacker in 1987. Over the next eight years, living in Brighton and Windsor, I attended countless profes…

I'm in the middle of a dream, though it might be nearer the beginning or end. Who can tell with dreams? I'm on a rocket, and the final countdown's begun. "10, 9, 8 ..." Then I look down at myself str…

I was weaned on Wimbledon in Australia. Year after year, I'd stayed up half the night to watch the finals on TV. And here I was in the northern hemisphere, able to witness the match in broad daylight…

Dylan woke with jackhammers pounding in his head and a tongue so furry it felt like it needed waxing. "Last time," he croaked, rolling onto his back and resolving to quit drinking again or, at least,…

The brief for October 2021's Furious Fiction was to set the short story in a COURT, include a character who measures something, and the words BALLOON, ROCK and UMBRELLA. So recalling Ernest Hemingway…

Mum's up first, though she doesn't like looking at her reflection nowadays. She splashes her face and turns away from me with a towel. Over her shoulder, I watch Mum gaze out the bathroom window. And…

I met Harry when he was six months old. He was the last of his litter, hiding under a kitchen table. And when the breeder dragged him out, Harry flopped his head on my leg and looked up at me with wo…

Jennifer swivelled her chair away from the laptop and stared at the lights receding into the distance beyond the high-rise office window. Her eyes had welled up reading Stephen's unexpected emailed d…

After living and working in England from 1987, my wife and I returned to Australia in 1995, overland. Michael Palin's 1991 BBC series, Pole to Pole, inspired our journey and route, travelling from no…

In 2019, approaching the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found a timely book in a secondhand bookshop: The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989 by Frederick Taylor. The bo…

Handcuffed in the police car, I wished the lamp hadn't been magical. "That, sir, is a genuine antique," the stallholder had asserted when I'd stopped and inspected it at the secondhand market. The oi…

Henry Rollins said, "A great way to learn about your country is to leave it." And I learned a lot about Australia while living overseas from 1987 to 1996. Books like Alice Nannup's When The Pelican L…